1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mechanism for acquiring counter values.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been a monitoring system that remotely monitors the operational status of peripheral apparatuses such as image forming apparatuses. This monitoring apparatus treats data called department counters of the image forming apparatuses in the following manner.
A monitoring center host periodically collects department counter information from image forming apparatuses placed in customer sites and manages the data by registering it in a database. A department is a customer-defined group/users, and a department counter is a counter indicating the total value of the number of times all users belonging to the group used an image forming apparatus.
Since the department counters are managed on a department basis, an increase in the number of departments results in an increase in the number of monitored counters. This causes an increase in the monitoring load on the monitoring center host and in the data size, leading to increased consumption of memory resources and processor resources. Therefore, attempts to reduce the data size have been made, for example as described in a Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-318701 and so on.
According to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-318701, an image forming apparatus associates log information about each department with a department ID and a department name change number on a job basis. It also manages a department name in association with the department ID and the department name change number. Therefore, when only the department name is changed without a change in the department ID, only the department name change number can be changed to store it along with the log information. This allows a reduction in the data size because the department name is not directly associated with the log information.
With the invention in this Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-318701, the data size may be reduced by the size of department names compared to the case where the department names themselves are stored in association with the log information. That is, the data size of individual log information may be reduced. However, even though the data size of the individual log information is reduced, the data amount as a whole increases if the number of managed image forming apparatuses increases and the number of departments increases.